The Second Life of Salman Rushdie

Whatever it is you know about the most famous writer in the world is some version of wrong. The man who spent nine years in the shadow of an Iranian fatwa is finally talking about the subject he most wishes to avoid

Here is an excerpt from the story:1.
When Salman Rushdie does talk about it—the ugly, unfortunate decade of fear, blame, and anger that he is determined will not define his life or work—he usually refers to it indirectly. It is simply "the thing" or "the thing that happened to me" or "that mess" or "the trouble" or "a particular collision with history" or, most often—held firmly at a distance within a highly charged single syllable—"that" or "it."

Only twice during two extensive conversations does he refer to it explicitly as "the fatwa": the death sentence pronounced upon him on February 14, 1989, by Iran's leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, in retaliation against supposed anti-Islamic blasphemy in Rushdie's fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. Even before the fatwa was declared, there had been growing unrest: demonstrations and book burnings in Britain, and riots in India and Pakistan in which seven people had died. In its wake, Rushdie went into hiding and was made aware that the threat against him, backed by a seven-figure bounty, was real. No physical harm was done to him, but by the time the Iranian government announced in 1998 that its policy had changed, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher had been shot, his Italian translator had been stabbed (both recovered), and his Japanese translator had been stabbed and killed. Rushdie had become the most famous serious literary novelist in the world—but not in any way worth wishing for.

Me: You must wake up some days and think, Did that really happen?

Rushdie: Well, I don't wake up thinking that. What I wake up thinking is, I hope I don't have to talk about it.

2.
The first time we meet is in New York, at the enduringly fashionable SoHo restaurant Balthazar, where he arrives unaccompanied, a baseball cap in his hand, after a morning writing about the photographer Sebastião Salgado. He has both the bearing of the owlish writer-recluse and the self-assurance of someone who's sure of his talents and status in the world. He browses the menu. "Today is what day, is it?" he asks. It is Wednesday. He checks the daily special. "Rabbit," he reads aloud, mutters to himself, "No, thank you," and orders a salad, some chicken, and a glass of wine. He is clean-shaven, having finally abandoned his familiar beard six months ago. "I had been sort of hacking it down, and it had become very much like designer stubble," he says. "And I just thought, Let's go the whole hog." He tells me most people feel it makes him look younger but that it took him a while to get used to how much his chin and jaw had aged over the sixteen years he'd hidden them away.

He is here in anticipation of his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown. He explains how the kernel of the book simply came to him: the idea of a murder, a distinguished man murdered by someone from Kashmir, and a grown-up daughter. "And somehow that triangle is what the book's about," he says. "I just had this scene—a puddle of blood on the sidewalk." He imagined a book unlike any of his others, written in close-up like a Bergman movie and without large elements of the fantastic. He wanted it to be a tight psychological novel about just these three people, but as he wrote it, he discovered once again that Salman Rushdie novels don't turn out like that. Still, for him, it is concise, and its attention is relatively constrained. "It's not, as Henry James said, a loose, baggy monster, which you could say of some of the other books."

These days he lives mostly in New York and London, where his two sons (one 26, the other 8) live, but he visits India two or three times a year, and like all his major novels, much of Shalimar the Clown is set on the Indian subcontinent. "I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character," he observes. He has been saying for years that he doesn't imagine returning to India in his writing again, but it keeps happening.